Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Education for Jobs of the Future

On Labor Day our local liberal newspaper opined on the state of the middle class in today’s world. In general the editorial board was pessimistic about the future, and said that the decline in the numbers of people who consider themselves middle class is largely due to “how sluggish and unoriginal our political class has been in responding to the decline of well paying jobs.” In other words, those that supposedly know best (politicians and the Teacher’s Unions) are not doing a very good job when it comes to actually educating students for the jobs of the future. Now here we are not talking, in general, about the quality or the inequality of the education system in the U.S., but rather about the lack of foresight in educating our youth for the jobs of tomorrow.

The op-ed correctly pointed out that the present educational system with summers off was designed for an agricultural economy when children helped with summer harvests, and that mandatory beginning computer programming should now be taught in middle school. Right on!
Recognize that here we have a very liberal newspaper that is strongly suggesting that some rather major changes need to be made in our country’s educational system. To this I would add a few peripheral questions:
Why are foreign languages now still required by middle schools and high schools, whereas learning the language of computer programming is not only not required, but only rarely offered?
Why is American Sign Language now accepted as fulfilling a college requirement for a language, whereas learning the language of computer programming is not?
Very interesting to me, however, was that never once did this op-ed actually mention the teacher’s unions by name, and likewise, never once, were charter schools mentioned as a potential solution. Part of this lack of innovation and subsequent stagnation can be remedied by charter schools, as encouraged by President Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

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